


in my blood

by perissologist



Series: a little less conversation [11]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dance, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 14:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16642055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perissologist/pseuds/perissologist
Summary: Dick is staring at him, eyes wide, breath heavy in the quick rise and fall of his chest. Jason’s gaze darts from the fine hairs curling over Dick’s forehead to the slight opening of his mouth. Visceral realization blooms in his chest.





	in my blood

The address Dick texts Jason leads him to Gotham Village, the neighborhood in the westernmost district of the city that feels like stepping back in time to 1950s New England. Cobblestoned streets, oaks shading the sidewalks, cafes and family-owned restaurants on every corner—only fifteen minutes from downtown Gotham, it’s nothing short of utterly disorienting. The building itself is sandwiched between an ice cream shop and a paint-your-own-pottery business; the bronze letters inscribed into the door read  _ The Loyd Studios for the Performing Arts. _

The bell over the door tinkles as Jason enters the lobby, feeling like a mudstained shoe on a freshly mopped floor in his  _ RH Automatics _ hoodie and ratty duffel. A girl with blonde hair and jaunty hoop earrings sitting behind the receptionist’s desk glances up from her computer and splits into a wide grin. “Jason, right?”

“Uh—yeah,” Jason says, startled. “I have a—uh—meeting with Dick Grayson?”

The girl gestures to the hallway connecting the lobby to the rest of the building. “Second room on the right,” she says. “Have fun.”

“Right. Thanks.” Jason hitches his duffel higher up his shoulder and hurries down the corridor. What  _ is _ this place?

The second room on the right is a sprawling, airy dance studio, complete with three mirrored walls, polished hardwood floors, and a ballet barre. Dick is sitting on the floor wrapping his ankles, deep in conversation with a girl in a black leotard who can’t be older than sixteen. His entire face seems to light up when Jason inches tentatively into the room. “Hey! You found us.”

“I did,” Jason says. It feels almost sacrilegious stepping onto the spotless floors in his dirty sneakers. “What is this place?”

Dick smiles. He looks more at ease here than Jason has ever seen him—save for midair above the stage at the Foundation Theater.  “It’s a branch of the Wayne Foundation for the Arts. The studio lends out expensive spaces and equipment to low-income kids. Dance rooms, shoes and clothes, instruments, recording equipment. There are some classes, too, and after-school programs. I spend a lot of time here when I’m not at the Foundation.” He laughs at Jason hovering in the doorway. “We don’t bite, you know.”

Jason coughs and thinks  _ fuck it _ , trekking across the room to join Dick and the girl on the floor. “Sorry. It’s just, like, freakishly nice here. I don’t want to fuck anything up.”

Dick grins. “Steph, the manager—you probably met her out front—keeps the place pristine. Sometimes I feel like I’m mucking things up, too.” He turns to the girl at his side, who’s watching Jason with keen, dark eyes. “Cass, this is Jason; he’s helping me and Diana choreograph a new show for the Company. Jason, meet Cassandra, my sister.”

Jason’s brows jump up despite himself. He’s heard about this girl: Cassandra Cain, the near-mute child who escaped from a lifetime of forced isolation under her paranoid ex-Marine father, taken on as a philanthropic project by the Police Commissioner’s daughter and learning to lead a normal life as a ballerina for the Gotham Classics Company. Jason remembers the headlines splayed across every newspaper in Gotham the day it was announced that Bruce Wayne intended to adopt her; he remembers the claims “unnamed sources” made that it was Dick Grayson, Wayne’s ward and heir to his fortune, who brought her home.

Cassandra goes from sitting cross-legged on the floor to upright on her feet in the time it takes Jason to blink. She glances at Dick, then grins at Jason and holds out a slender hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Jason drops his duffel and takes the hand. “You too.”

Cassandra leans down to grab the hoodie and pointe shoes she left on the floor. “Have fun,” she tells Dick, in exactly the same way the receptionist told Jason.

“Oh—” Dick’s eyes dart to Jason, then back to his sister. “You can stay if you want, Cassie. We’re just going over some ideas for the show.”

“It’s okay,” Cassandra says. “Going to hang out with Stephy. You…do what you need to do.” Her dark eyes seem to twinkle as she slips out of the room, footsteps silent against the floor.

The door falls shut behind her. Dick looks to Jason, eyes wide. “Right.”

Jason swallows. “Right.”

“Um—” Dick scrambles to his feet. “You said you had some song ideas we could try a choreograph to?”

“Oh—yeah.” Jason doesn’t know what to do with the sudden tension in the air. It’s the first time they’ve been alone together since their not-date at Gotham Park, and Jason can’t stop remembering the way Dick looked at him then, eyes impossibly blue under the starlight. “My friend Artemis is a DJ. She made a mashup for me of a ballet number and some Shawn Mendes song.”

Dick blinks at him from the speakers. “Wait—Artemis, the DJ in LA who started in Greece?”

Jason’s brows go up. “You know her?”

“Yeah, she’s like, Diana’s cousin five times removed or something,” Dick laughs. “Half of my warm-up playlist is her EDM.”

Jason grins as he goes to plug his phone into the speakers. “You do ballet warm-ups to EDM?”

Dick flushes. “Is that weird?”

“Nah,” Jason says.  _ Kind of cute, actually, _ his brain supplies, which he immediately shunts down his Well of Repression as far as it will go. “I’ll tell her you’re a fan.”

The moody, sweeping sounds of a cello spill from the speakers, filling the studio with its deep, sliding notes. Dick’s face instantly lights up. “Swan Lake!”

Jason laughs. “Yeah?”

“My favorite,” Dick says, but before he can do anything else, the cello slides shifts seamlessly into crooning vocals.  _ “Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in. Sometimes I feel like giving up…” _

Jason gestures to the floor. “Can I?”

Dick smiles at him. “Of course.”

Jason draws in a breath and turns to the mirrors. He’s never paid much attention to Shawn Mendes beyond what comes on the radio in the shop, and even then Roy always grumbles and changes the channel; but he finds that he doesn’t mind this song, with its echoing vocals and soft instrumentals. He closes his eyes and takes a moment to find the beat of the music; then he begins to move.

_ “Laying on the bathroom floor, feeling nothing,” _ Mendes sings, and Jason lists forward on bent knees, head dropped. His hands find the floor on  _ “overwhelmed and insecure,” _ and he balances on his palms to sweep his legs out and to the side. He curls in on himself to  _ “give me something,” _ then arches back out on  _ “I could take to ease my mind,” _ twisting to the side with arms reaching above his head as he presses his forehead to the floor on  _ “slowly.” _ He propels himself back to his feet in the moment’s pause between time changes; then the thumping heartbeat of the song begins to pulse beneath the lilting guitar.  _ “Help me,” _ Mendes pleads, and Jason staggers forward on bent knees;  _ “It’s like the walls are caving in,” _ and he spins to the side like he’s being tugged, back arching, arms sweeping through the air to wrap around his torso.  _ “Sometimes I feel like giving up, no medicine is strong enough…” _

The music is fast but melancholic, and Jason’s movements are the same, the sweeping instrumentals carrying him around the wide-open space inside the room. He’s lighter than he usually is, drawing himself tight and then unspooling again, like the yearning at the heart of the song brought to life. Dick never looks away, his glittering blue eyes following Jason’s every move; Jason feels the gaze prickling on the back of his neck, raising goosebumps up and down his arms. 

Before Jason knows it, the vocals are lapsing into the fast melody of the piano, the high, clear rasp of violins over the moody reprise of the cellos. He falters, unsure of what to do with the change in tone—but in a second, Dick is stepping forward, so light on his feet it’s like gravity has no effect on him. He leaps into the air in a long horizontal jump, effortless, and comes back down in a perfect plié. As the piano climbs, the plié turns into a sweeping spin, carrying over into a gazelle-like run that circles around the perimeter of the room. The music builds, and Dick spins and dips and glides, like water flowing, like a tide ebbing back and forth with the run of the chords. And then, as the violins climb into a soaring refrain, he does something that Jason has never seen before, not in the dozens of hours of ballet videos he’s watched trying to keep up with the Company: He throws a shoulder forward and somersaults in midair, landing on his toes and diffusing his own momental with a twice-around pirouette. The strings stretch into the famously dark, decisive chorus of the ballet’s signature piece, and Dick’s leaping steps begin to land with deliberate force, only for the weighted energy to transform into more pirouettes, higher jumps, even more sudden flips that Jason realize come more from Dick’s circus days than his ballet training. 

_ “I need somebody now,” _ Mendes sings, voice intertwining with the cascading piano and rising strings, and before Jason can think he’s falling into step beside Dick, letting the music rush through him until he’s matching the pace of Dick’s movements with his own. Dick jumps into a midair split and Jason slides low onto his knees, then tucks downward to roll across one shoulder back onto his feet, knees staggered and back arched.  _ “It isn’t in my blood,” _ Shawn declares, and Jason flings a hand out like he’s reaching for something, something just out of his grasp, and lets the movement carry him forward, the music resonating in his chest as Dick spins and leaps beside him.

Eventually, finally, the music ends where it began: On the final notes of Tchaikovsky’s opera, deliciously drawn-out, the echoing vocals melting into the last chords. It ends with Dick turning from his final arabesque, still balanced on the toes of his pointe shoes, to reach his hands out, and Jason letting the impulsive drive of the beat slip away from him so he can slow enough to reach back and grasp Dick’s forearms. The music fades away, leaving them in ringing silence. 

Dick is staring at him, eyes wide, breath heavy in the quick rise and fall of his chest. Jason’s gaze darts from the fine hairs curling over Dick’s forehead to the slight opening of his mouth. Visceral realization blooms in his chest.

Dick licks his lips. “Wow.”

Jason barks out a laugh. “Uh huh.”

“That was good, right?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, mouth curling. “That was good.”

Dick smiles. He gently withdraws his arms; Jason finds that his hands feel empty without them. “Water?”  

Jason nods and watches as Dick trails over to the other side of the studio to rummage in his duffel bag. The atmosphere in the room has changed; the uneasy awkwardness from before has melted into something warm, comfortable, almost intimate. Jason feels almost hazy, like he’s just woken up from a good dream to a quiet Sunday morning. Dick grins at him over his shoulder and holds up a paper bag. “I’ve also got ginger snaps.”

Jason chuckles. They sit cross-legged together in the middle of the floor, passing the water bottle and ginger snaps back and forth. They talk: About the routine and how they can repeat it and make it better, about the music and the other pieces they should try, about ballet and hip-hop and all the things in between. Jason is more than a little surprised to find that Dick  _ gets _ it—he nods along to Jason’s scattered musings on the various choreographies they can try without blinking an eye. For someone supposedly raised in the rigid world of ballet, Dick has an eerily versatile set of knowledge. Even accounting for the circus upbringing.

Eventually, the discussion lapses into a comfortable silence, the two of them bent ever-so-slightly toward each other, knees touching. “So,” Jason says to break the silence, biting into a cookie. Outside, the sun is a low ball of orange in the sky, filtering its golden light through the emerald-limbed trees outside the studio’s windows. “Exactly how many siblings do you have?”

Dick laughs. “Three,” he says. “Well, almost. I’ve got two baby brothers, Tim and Damian; we’re still fighting for Cass.” 

Jason tries to remember what he can of Vogue profiles and Wired YouTube interviews. “All adopted, right?”

“Except Damian,” DIck says. “He’s Bruce’s only biological kid. But he came last, ironically enough.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Bruce had a fling with the daughter of an oil baron during his postgraduate adventures,” Dick says, wry. “She never told him she was pregnant. When the kid was seven, his grandfather was arrested for corruption. His mother had to lowkey flee the country, so she sent him to live with Bruce.”

“And the other one? Tim?”

“The son of the Waynes’ close family friends. His mom passed away and his dad wasn’t really capable of taking care of him, so Bruce took him in.”

Jason looks at Dick, at the late afternoon sunlight glowing in his dark hair and feathery eyelashes. “And you?” he asks, quietly.

Dick stills. His eyes flicker up to meet Jason’s. “I thought you were a Gothamite.”

Jason shrugs. “I was, like, six when it happened. Besides, you know you can’t trust Gotham gossip mags to tell the truth if it was staring us all in the face. I want to hear it from you.”

Dick’s mouth curls, but it’s smaller than before. “I grew up in the circus,” he says. “My parents were murdered by a mobster when I was nine. I bounced around a few orphanages for a couple of weeks, but I was too much trouble for them, I think. Bruce was at that show that night—the night they died. He took me in when the paperwork finally cleared. I grew up with him.”

_ FAMED ACROBATS FALL TO THEIR DEATHS AT HALY’S CIRCUS _ —Jason still remembers the lurid headline across the top of every tabloid in the city. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he is—because no kid should have to watch parents that loved them die in front of their eyes. 

Dick lifts a shoulder in a shrug, but the smile at the corner of his mouth is a little more genuine. “What about you? You’re born-and-bred Gotham scrap, aren’t you?”

Jason snorts. “If that’s a nice way of saying Bowery trash, then yeah. My dad was a lowlife who spent most of my childhood in and out of jail. My mom was kind of out of it most of the time, but she was there.”

“Is she still…?”

“Yeah; she met some guy at the company where she used to clean toilets and moved to Jump City with him. He’s kind of a sadsack, but, hey. She’s not homeless, so who am I to complain?”

“Do you still talk to her?”

“Maybe once or twice a year.”

Dick nods. He flexes his shoulders and looks around, expression softening. “This studio is named after my mother,” he says. “Mary Loyd. Bruce opened it for my fifteenth birthday.” He shakes his head with a self-deprecating smile. “I have to remind myself how lucky I am to have the parents I did, even though it was cut short. They loved me, and I loved them. Sometimes that’s enough, isn’t it?”

Jason stares at him. His silence draws Dick’s gaze back to him. “What?”

“Jesus,” Jason mutters, and then he’s hooking his hand around the back of Dick’s neck and crushing their mouths together.

Dick’s first reaction is to make a muffled noise of shock—but not half a second later he’s grabbing Jason by the front of his t-shirt and dragging him closer, desperate. His mouth falls open for Jason, and god, he tastes like ginger snaps and spiced coffee, the saccharine-sweet stuff that Starbucks only sells when it starts to get colder out. Jason knew from the moment he met Dick that kissing him would be good; he didn’t know it would be so  _ intoxicating. _ Dick is warm and liquid-pliable, as addictive as a batch of freshly-baked caramels. Jason slides his palm around the slender column of his neck and rests a thumb over the delicate tracheal ridge of his throat; Dick shivers beneath him and leans into his touch, a reaction that only makes the blood grow hotter under Jason’s skin. He tilts his jaw and licks at the corner of Dick’s mouth, catches his plump lower lip with the dagger point of his canine. Dick whimpers and burrows closer, fists curling in Jason’s shirt, mouth hot and wet and insistent against his. 

They break apart eventually, foreheads pressed together, chests heaving. Dick’s mouth is red; his pupils are dilated.  _ Christ, _ Jason thinks. How can one person be so fucking beautiful? “You taste really good.”

Dick shivers and groans, biting his lip. “You can’t say things like that,” he protests, weakly. 

Jason barks out a sudden laugh. He doesn’t remove his hand from Dick’s neck. “Sorry,” he rasps. His throat is dry. “I kind of jumped you there.”

Dick’s eyes dart down to Jason’s mouth and up again. “You’re forgiven,” he says. “Very much forgiven.” Reluctantly, he untangles his hands from Jason’s shirt and settles back onto his haunches. “Jason,” he starts, then huffs, cheeks reddening. “Listen, that was great—like, um, really great—but I thought—I thought you didn’t feel that way about me?”

_ Shit. _ Jason pushes a breath out between his teeth. “You’re right. I’m sorry, I’ve been an ass. Before—it was because of Roy. When I saw how messed up he was around you…I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt him.”

Dick flinches, but his gaze remains steady, blue and unyielding. “And now?” he asks, softly.

Jason swallows. He takes a moment to look at him—really look at him, Dick Grayson kneeling on the floor of the charity arts studio his adoptive father built for him for his fifteenth birthday, mouth still swollen from where Jason tried to devour him not thirty seconds earlier. The dancer with so much sheer talent he makes it seem like the laws of physics don’t apply to him, the man with so much kindness that everyone from wary orphans to shady businessmen flock to him. The one person who Roy, the most obnoxiously friendly person Jason knows, has asked Jason to stay away from. “Now,” he says, quietly, “I think I deserve an explanation. And I think it’s about time Roy gives me one.”

Dick’s shoulders tense, but he nods. He hesitates for a moment, wrestling with his next words. “Jason, I—I’m kind of seeing someone, right now.”

Jason nods; he was expecting this. “Slade Wilson.”

“Yeah,” Dick sighs. “But it’s a casual relationship. It always has been.”

Jason inches forward, just enough to press their knees together. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t want to ask anything of you right now. That wouldn’t be fair to you.” He pauses, licks his lips. “But maybe—someday?”

Dick’s smile lights up his entire face, and that—that is why Jason tumbled headfirst down this hill of bad decisions in the first place. “Yes,” he replies. His fingertips find Jason’s against the floor. “Someday.” 

~*~

Jason is still grinning when he walks through the door of the apartment. Roy, Kori, Kyle, and Duke are at the kitchen table, heads bent together over Duke’s computer. Jason drops his duffel by the door and begins toeing off his sneakers. “Yo, Harper, can I talk to you for a sec?”

Kori, Duke, and Kyle turn toward him. Jason stills at the sight of their expressions. “What?” he asks. “What is it?”

Roy glances up at Jason, then down at the screen again. He begins to read.  _ “According to an anonymous inside source, the tech megacompany Blockbuster has shortlisted Gotham to be the location of its second base of operations, estimated to be the workplace of over ten thousand employees. In their negotiations with the corporation, the mayor’s office has offered Blockbuster developmental rights over 64th and 2nd to 101st and 35th, an area that will likely undergo major renovations to transform into the company’s new home—as well as major displacements.” _

Jason frowns as the words sink in. “Wait—64th and 2nd to 101st and 35th…that’s us. That’s all of Robbinsville.”

“Yeah,” Roy says, short. “That’s us all right.”

“‘Major renovations as well as major displacements’—what the fuck does that mean?”

“It means,” Roy grinds out, “if this billion-dollar tech company decides to build its next headquarters in Gotham, the mayor himself is giving it free reign to tear down this entire neighborhood and throw all of us out onto the street where we belong.”

Jason swallows and, slowly, shuts the door behind him. His entire life, the upper echelons of Gotham have done their best to grind the East End out of existence, like an unwanted canker sore better left forgotten. This is not his first fight for the sanctity of his home, and it won’t be his last. Roy, Kori, Duke, and Kyle watch as he walks into the kitchen and crosses his arms. 

“Okay,” Jason says. “So what are we gonna do about it?”

**Author's Note:**

> :-) 
> 
> (the reason why the description of jason's dance was so bad in this installment is because i just could not do the choreography justice with my sad little words. watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=894X4nV9Mys and show it the love it deserves!)


End file.
